Flintlock

by William W. Johnstone

  “Like I said, it goes with the profession,” Roper said. “Bang-bang, close enough to hug each other.”

  “Don’t it bother you none, Abe?” Flintlock said.

  “Nope. And if it did, I’d get into a different line of work.” He stared hard at Flintlock. “Bother you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe there’s something to be said for killing a man at a distance. You can’t see his damned eyes.”

  “Then let’s shoot the old Hawken. McCarty says it’s sighted in at a hundred and twenty-five yards. Hell, Sammy, you can’t look into a man’s eyes at that distance.”

  After sharing the enlisted men’s breakfast of salt pork, beans and hardtack, Flintlock and the others picked up some empty bottles from the sutler and walked into the foothills about half a mile from the fort.

  “You ever walk behind a plow, Sam’l?” Roper said as they stepped through the clear light of the new aborning day.

  “Can’t say as I have,” Flintlock said. “Old Barnabas knew nothing about farming.”

  “I did. My pa was a farmer, or he tried to be. Here’s a word of advice, Sammy, never feel inclined to plow the land. All you see the livelong day is a mule’s ass. Now, when a man works from the back of a horse he can see across the country as far as his eye is good.”

  “You done some cowboyin’, Abe?” Flintlock said. “I never knowed that.”

  “Sure I did. Went up the trail for the first time when I was fourteen.”

  “Hell, you think you know a man and it turns out that you don’t,” Flintlock said. “Doesn’t that beat all?”

  “There’s a lot to know. Me, I’ve been a lawman, stagecoach guard, bank robber, back to lawman again, bounty hunter, and wunst I was a dishwasher at one o’ them fancy restaurants in Denver. But that didn’t last. I must have broke a hundred o’ cups an’ plates afore they cut me adrift.”

  “A man who washes dishes must know how to take care,” Charlie Fong said. “Or he’ll break many.”

  “Is that one o’ your wise Chinaman sayings, Charlie?” Roper said.

  “Well, I just made it up, but I guess it is.”

  “Then pace off a hundred and twenty-five steps from here and set them bottles up,” Roper said. “That’s a wise white man sayin’.”

  They’d stopped in a grassy cut between two tall hills crested with aspen and a few scattered juniper. There was no wind and the morning was already hot, the sun climbing in a blue sky that looked like an upturned ceramic bowl. Insects made their small music in the grass and jays quarreled in the tree branches.

  Charlie Fong, taking giant steps, paced off the required distance then dragged a dead tree trunk from the brush. He set up six bottles on the trunk then yelled, “How’s that?”

  “Good, Charlie,” Roper said. “Now get back here. We don’t want Sammy shootin’ an ounce of lead into you.” He turned to Flintlock and in a normal tone of voice said, “You know how to load that thing?”

  “Of course I know,” Flintlock said. “Old Barnabas taught me.”

  “Then let’s see if you can shoot it. I guess Barnabas taught you that as well.”

  Flintlock loaded the Hawken, drew a bead on the bottle on the extreme left and fired.

  The glass bottle shattered into a shower of shards.

  His ears ringing, Flintlock lowered the rifle and said, his voice sounding hollow in his head, “Dead center.”

  Roper said something, but the roar of a Winchester drowned out his words.

  The remaining five bottles exploded, one after the other, in the space of a couple of seconds.

  Asa Pagg took his rifle from his shoulder and grinned.

  “Hell, Asa, what did you do that fer?” Flintlock said. “I wasn’t done shootin’ yet.”

  “It would take you all day to get five more shots off with that old blunderbush, Sam, and I’ve got news that can’t wait.”

  “That was good shootin’, Asa,” Charlie Fong said. “An’ we was just saying that gunfighting men don’t shoot a long gun worth a damn.”

  “Well you was wrong, an’ me not even half tryin’,” Pagg said. “Of course, a pistol fighter needs to get up close with a rifle.”

  He wore a faded red bib-front shirt, black bandana, and his brown wool pants were tucked into mule-eared boots. His hat was also black, with a wide, tooled-leather band edged with woven silver. Perhaps to appear less threatening, he’d set aside his revolvers. The little finger of his left hand bore a large gold signet, engraved with the words “Mi amor,” and overall, Pagg looked prosperous.

  “When you get done with your braggin’, Asa, maybe you’ll tell us your news,” Flintlock said. The wanton destruction of his bottles still stung.

  “Well, it’s for Abe,” Pagg said. “Guess who just rode into Fort Defiance as bold as brass?”

  “I’d guess Jack Coffin,” Roper said.

  Pagg looked disappointed. “How did you know?”

  “I’m hiring him. He’s scouting for us.”

  It didn’t take Pagg long to work it out.

  “Hell, you want him to find the golden bell for you, huh?”

  Roper said nothing and Pagg grinned. “I swear, if brains were dynamite you boys couldn’t blow the wax out of your ears. You know the breed is liable to cut your throats in your sleep?”

  “We’ll take our chances,” Roper said.

  “Abe, Coffin is half Jicarilla Apache an’ they don’t come any meaner. His other half was ol’ Hack Coffin, him that ate his Kiowa squaw one winter up on the Flathead River country to keep hisself from starving.”

  “That ain’t quite true, Asa,” Charlie Fong said. “Hack and the Kiowa squaw ate the lady’s grandmother, is what happened. Ol’ Hack always said the old woman was as tough on the teeth as wet rawhide. He got hung in Tombstone you know, ol’ Hack, for always gettin’ drunk an’ being a damned nuisance.”

  “How you know so much about it, Charlie?” Flintlock said.

  “I cooked for the Clantons an’ them when they had a ranch at Lewis Springs, west of Tombstone. Hack used to stop by for a visit and a feed, and he’d come into the cookhouse for coffee and we’d get to talking.”

  “Then I stand corrected,” Pagg said, his black eyes as hard as obsidian. “Just don’t correct me too often, huh, Charlie?”

  “Only setting the record straight, Asa,” Fong said. “No offense.”

  Not for the first time, Flintlock wondered at Charlie Fong.

  He was a small, thin man with expressive brown eyes and a ready, genuine smile. Charlie claimed to be about forty, but he could’ve been any age. He never openly carried a gun, but always had a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson about him somewhere. Apologetic and inoffensive, he spoke softly and never started or encouraged a quarrel.

  Yet Charlie had consorted with hard, violent men and had been a member of the notorious Tong gang along San Francisco’s Barbary Coast where shootings and cuttings were an everyday occurrence and life was cheap.

  Flintlock teased Charlie mercilessly and when they met it was an ongoing thing between them. But he’d never pushed the little man to anger and never would.

  Once a Tong, always a Tong, and behind Charlie Fong’s mild Oriental façade was a man to be reckoned with.

  Flintlock had his Colt in the waistband of his pants, otherwise he would’ve never asked the question that he did now.

  “Asa,” he said, “you make light of the golden bell. You wouldn’t be after it yourself, would you?”

  The stunned, disbelieving expression on Pagg’s face answered Flintlock’s question.

  “Didn’t I already tell you idiots that there is no golden bell?” he said. “It’s a . . . hell, what’s the word I’m looking for, Charlie?”

  “Myth,” Fong said.

  “Yeah, that’s it, a myth. The bell doesn’t exist. It never existed. Now get that through your thick heads and go do something useful like robbing a bank.”

  Pagg shook his head, turned and walked away. The he stopped and said, “Abe, I’ll tell
Jack Coffin that you want him to go into the mountains and lead you to a giant golden bell.”

  He roared laughter through his words. “Hell, that ought to make him real happy.”

  His name was Kuruk, a sixteen-year-old Mescalero warrior with black, glittering eyes that had watched the white men shooting in the gulch.

  When the men left he crouched among the aspen for a while, then rose and walked silently to his horse.

  Geronimo would want to hear of this, that there were white men at the fort that had not been counted before.

  Kuruk smiled. Geronimo would tell him he’d brought good news . . . that there were now more whites to kill.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The land that lay around Sergeant Tim O’Neil and Privates Oscar Werner and Jacob Spooner was vast; endless distances in all directions that had never been measured, dominated by the blue and red mesas and skyscraping cliffs that made up the Sonsela Buttes country.

  The mirrors had been talking for the past hour and O’Neil was worried. That went double for the two eighteen-year-olds under his command.

  Spooner was an orphan from New York’s Five Corners, a towheaded runt who’d missed too many meals as a child, and Werner hailed from a cuckoo-clock village in the Bavarian Alps and could speak little English.

  They were thirty miles north of Fort Defiance, in a land without shadow. The sun was lost in a brassy sky and about them heat shimmered as though the earth was melting.

  “Well, they’re here all right,” O’Neil said. “Talking mirrors and Apache sign all over the place.”

  “Maybe the column will show up, Sarge, huh?” Spooner said. He’d only been west for three weeks and his nose and cheeks were burned red.

  “Don’t count on it, lad,” O’Neil said. “Colonel Brent and the regiment may still be in the Red Valley. We must go to them.”

  O’Neil’s orders had been to scout for hostiles as far south as Sonsela Buttes. If he encountered Apaches he was on no account to engage the enemy but to immediately report back to the main column.

  O’Neil smiled to himself at that. He’d no intention of engaging the enemy, but it seemed the Apaches had a different idea about that.

  Now, pinned down and with no hope of assistance, the noncom swept the landscape with his field glasses, bringing into close-up focus desert, brush and the eternal mesas just as immovable and majestic as the mountains. Nothing moved and there was no sound. A lizard panted on a flat rock on the sandy bank of the dry wash near where O’Neil lay, and in the distance a buzzard glided and quartered the land with its scalpel eyes.

  “You think they know we’re here?” Spooner said.

  “We’re the lads the mirrors have been talking about,” O’Neil said. “Of course they know we’re here.”

  “Will they attack?” Spooner said. He touched his tongue to his dry lips.

  “Apaches are notional, and there’s no telling what they’ll do,” O’Neil said. “But I reckon they’ll at least feel us out, see if it’s worth a throw of the dice.”

  Werner was farther down the wash holding the horses. He didn’t understand the talk, but the sergeant’s tone and Spooner’s scared face told him all he needed to know.

  He moved closer, bending low to take advantage of the cover of the bank.

  Thirty minutes passed and the noon heat was unbearable. About a pint of water sloshed in each of the three canteens and O’Neil gathered them together. They might be in for a siege and the water would need to be rationed.

  He was content to stay where he was. The wash made a U-turn around a large sandstone boulder, and over the years the spring runoff from a nearby mesa had cut it a good four feet deep. O’Neil and the others had taken a position at the bend of the U and the rock was at their back.

  The way O’Neil had it figured, if the Apaches attacked, Werner, a good marksman with his Springfield carbine, would take a position next to the rock and guard the rear while he and Spooner took care of a frontal assault.

  Of course, they were facing Apaches, and O’Neil knew it wouldn’t be that simple. They weren’t like the Plains Indians he’d fought before, a bunch of mounted warriors coming at you all at once. Apaches were just as brave as the Sioux and Cheyenne, but considerably more cautious.

  As though to reinforce that opinion, a probing shot kicked up a startled exclamation point of dust on the bank three feet to O’Neil’s left.

  Beside him Private Spooner cut loose a shot from his carbine.

  “Did you see the Apache?” O’Neil said.

  The soldier shook his head.

  O’Neil wasn’t a cursing man by nature, but he yelled, “Then damn your eyes, don’t shoot at shadows. You hear me? Conserve your ammunition.”

  “Sorry, Sarge,” Spooner said.

  Another shot. Close enough to shower dirt into O’Neil’s face.

  “They’re taking our measure,” he said. He rolled over on his left side and called out to Werner. “Leave the horses. Take up a position next to the rock and guard our rear.”

  The German looked puzzled.

  “Damnit, man!” O’Neil roared. “Learn how to speak American.”

  He got to his feet, grabbed Werner and dragged him to the rock. He pushed the man down into a crouched position. “There,” he said.

  Werner said nothing. But he looked frightened.

  Behind O’Neil, Spooner fired again.

  “I think I got him, Sarge!” he yelled. “Damnit, I reckon I nailed him. I’m gonna get a scalp for Custer!”

  “Nooo!” O’Neil shrieked as he lunged for the soldier.

  Too late.

  Spooner climbed over the parapet and then sprang to his feet, grinning as he reached for the knife on his belt.

  A bullet smashed the grin from his lips and the lower jaw from his skull.

  His mouth a bloody cavern of blood, shattered teeth and splintered bone, the young trooper, his eyes wild, fell back into the wash. His booted feet gouged convulsively into the sand, once, twice . . . then he lay still.

  Oscar Werner turned his head and saw the grotesque horror of what had once been Spooner’s face. Far from his snow-capped land, surrounded by a scorching desert inferno and a skilled and ruthless enemy, the teenager broke.

  He rose to his feet and ran past Sergeant O’Neil. Werner scrambled up the bank, raised his hands and ran in the direction of the hidden Apaches.

  “Kameraden! Kameraden!” he yelled, his teenaged voice high-pitched and frantic.

  But Apaches had no word for comrade.

  Horrified, O’Neil watched as strong brown arms struck like copper snakes and pulled Werner to the ground.

  Alive.

  O’Neil had no time to act. He could only react.

  He stood, thumbed back the hammer of his Colt and fired.

  His bullet crashed into Werner’s blond head and for a moment it looked as though the young cavalryman had pinned an exotic red blossom in his hair.

  Sergeant O’Neil could not look longer.

  Screaming their anger and frustration, half a dozen Apache warriors rose from the earth like the resurrection of the dead and charged him.

  O’Neil shoved the muzzle of his Colt into his mouth, angling upward, and pulled the trigger. Blood, bone and brain fanned above his head as he collapsed.

  The Apaches, outraged at what they took to be a sign of cowardice, pissed on O’Neil’s corpse.

  Geronimo, old, wise and wizened, stared at O’Neil’s body. The soldiers had not fought well, and it seemed that the taking and burning of Fort Defiance was well within his means. He had thirty warriors, more than enough if this shooting scrape was an indication of the fighting prowess of the white soldiers.

  But Geronimo was cautious, a man with a wait-and-see attitude that had earned him the Apache name Goyathlay, The Yawner.

  He knew the young bucks were primed for war and would press for an immediate attack on the fort. But, though he was not a chief, Geronimo’s medicine was powerful because he talked with the spirits of th
e dead, and the young men would listen to him.

  It came to him then that he should postpone the attack for a couple more days until he was sure of a victory....

  The Yawner would wait and see.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Jack Coffin did not scoff at the plan to find the Golden Bell of Santa Elena. He said only, “It is guarded by a specter. His name is Death.”

  Abe Roper smiled. “Do we believe that, Jack?”

  “I believe it. What you believe is of no concern to me.”

  The breed’s black eyes moved to Flintlock. “I feel your hate, Samuel.”

  “I don’t hate you, Jack,” Flintlock said.

  “I think you do. You hate me because you fear me.”

  “We’re all friends here,” Charlie Fong said quickly. “I mean, ain’t we?”

  “I have no friends,” Coffin said. “I had a few, many years ago, but I buried them.”

  “Well, we’re not your enemy, Jack,” Roper said. “Are we, Sam’l?”

  Before Flintlock could answer, Coffin said, “You are white men. All white men are my enemy.”

  “Here, Jack, you ain’t throwin’ in with ol’ Geronimo, are you?” Roper said. “If you plan to go on the warpath, wait until you find us the goddamned bell.”

  Coffin shook his head and his long black hair spilled over his shoulders. “Geronimo is doomed, as are all the Apaches. And me along with them.”

  For reasons known only to himself, the breed had adopted the costume of the vaquero, much faded by harsh weather. He wore a tight charro jacket, silver-studded leather pants, the cotton shirt of the vaquero, and a wide sombrero.

  “Hell, Jack, you’re only half Apache. You got nothing to fear,” Roper said. “What’s your white half?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care.”

  “Too bad. But I’ve got your daddy pegged as a Frenchy. Wunst I shacked up with a French gal in El Paso for a spell, and you got the look. The Frenchy look, I mean. Kinda swarthy an’ all.”

  Coffin turned to Flintlock again. “What do you think, Samuel?”

  “I’d say you’re half skunk, but I could be wrong.”